


tracks a & b

by kemonomimi



Category: Uta no Prince-sama
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Multi, fem!Ren
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-18 22:54:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5946370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kemonomimi/pseuds/kemonomimi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which fem!Ren Jinguji meets the loves of her lives in two different instances with two different sets of circumstances.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Track A -- Hijirikawa Masato

The first time they meet, they are attending a party.

She is eight and he is seven, and they both are lonely children out of place in the world of adults and their politic games. She is much more extroverted than he; she leans on the wall beside him, her sky-blue gaze directed at the quiet boy to her left with curiosity. Boring isn’t it, she asks, but receives no response. The boy in question looks around as if to say, who me? And she smiles a warm little smile that makes him feel like melted candy goo inside as she asks again.

Somehow the two of them end up splashing in the fountain outside the party venue until the gathering comes to a close and they are returned to their respective families. He doesn’t remember much more about that night – surely he was scolded for his wet suit, for the streak of mischief he has never exhibited before, but it is not important. There are other memories of long nights spent playing with the blonde girl with the princess smile but the first time they met sticks out the most.

Now he watches her from across the courtyard. She’s grown now, more woman than girl, and she’s surrounded by male and female alike. She’s popular with everyone, for her beauty and the self-proclaimed words of love she can string together with very little urging. She catches him looking and gives him a smile that isn’t quite right, and he turns his head away.

They’re assigned partners for an assignment. As the class breaks apart in mad flurries to find the name written on the slips of paper handed out by the instructor, confident heeled footfalls approach his desk, and a manicured hand grips the edge of it. His name, Masato Hijirikawa, she reads aloud, which results in a few broken-hearted whines from some of his other classmates. When he looks up at her he’s met with a challenging smirk, and he grits his teeth, determined.

They bicker a lot, but she does her share of the work as instructed. It’s progressing more smoothly than Masato expected it to go, it’s not easy working with a childhood friend turned rival, but perhaps that should have served as a warning sign.

He’s asked to deliver her report card one evening after she didn’t show up to class. He doesn’t meant to look at it, he really doesn’t, but the folder falls to the floor and he stares in shock at failing grades and comments from the teaching staff that detail her lack of ambition and that she has failed to turn in a single assignment that semester. There’s a month left it in the grading period, and if she doesn’t show improvement she will be booted from the school.

She comes to the door when he knocks and meets his terse look coolly. “I thought you had more sense than that,” he tells her as he hands her the offensive piece of paper, because he’s disappointed and he’s never been able to hide his feelings from her. “I thought your shallow behavior was an act, he says sharply, but I guess I was wrong.”

She slaps him.

They don’t see one another for a week, and during that time she doesn’t attend class.

He starts on her half of the project, assuming she won’t finish her share. When one afternoon a soft knock summons him from his desk and her half is left in the doorway, completed, some of his sour feelings finally melt away. The next afternoon Masato knocks on her door in return, arms heavy with piles of books and papers after consulting teachers, and she answers it with pursed lips and an arched brow. The work can be made up, he says. There is a lot to be done, but he can help her, if she’d like. 

She steps aside and lets him into her dorm room, and the work begins.

The edge in her smile melts during their time spent together. They still bicker, but now the words aimed at one another are more playful, even as the deadline approaches and the tension grows in intensity.

The final afternoon he finds her sitting among piles of done work, with a picnic basket on the floor. She finished the work, she tells him. They should have a celebratory picnic. He consents when she keeps poking and prodding and sticks her bottom lip out at him pathetically, and the pair of them spend the afternoon in the shade with a basket of food to be shared between them.

That evening he walks her back to her dorm room, ever the gentleman. At the door she catches his arm, and kisses him square on the mouth, then withdraws with a lack of confidence that prompts him to lean in and return what she gifted him, with a certain hunger that rekindles her confidence and has her lacing her arms around his neck as his settle on her shoulders, then her waist. 

They break apart, both a little wide-eyed and pink-cheeked at what so spontaneously transpired between them, but then they return to one another’s embrace, already missing it only after hardly becoming acquainted with it. It feels right and good, so it isn’t questioned when they both lean in for a good night kiss.

It’s been a year since that night when they kissed in the hallway, and she has been wearing his ring on her finger for a little over half of that time. Today is the big day; she’s in her white dress with his little sister Mai with a basket of flower petals at her side beaming up at her new big sister. Not even the Hijirikawa patriarch can be angry for long at her unfortunate family name, because his son has a beautiful bride and surely beautiful grandchildren will be on the way soon, or at least that’s what the ideal future holds in store for the pair.

What the patriarch doesn’t know is that their honeymoon will last for a year abroad. Ren seeks adventure in travel, and Masato seeks to learn and experience new culture. Together, away from the pressures of home, they’re going to become even more acquainted with one another and learn a little something about the world, and it will be the beginning of a long, full life shared together.

The music starts to the play and she steps into the main hall, ready to meet her future with Masato head-on.


	2. Track B -- Kurosaki Ranmaru

The first time they meet is at a party.

It is loud and crowded but the drinks are cool and Ren has her eyes on his long lean frame from the moment she walked in. It helps that he looked like the exact opposite from the type of men she was encouraged to pursue, and when her friends – she uses the term loosely – turned their catty whispered remarks on the solo rocker in the corner, Ren brakes away from the throng to prove something.

He doesn’t respond much to her, initially. She flirts and twirls her hair and smiles honey-sweet but he doesn’t bat an eye, and that just intrigues her more. When she finally questions the guitar case that leans like a stone pillar against the wall next to him, he talks a little more. It’s a bass, he explains. His girlfriend, he mutters pointedly. Ren smiles at that, warmly for the first time that night. She talks to him about it until she has to leave because her ride is there, and she still doesn’t know his name by the end of it.

She prods and pokes around utilizing all of her connections until his name emerges – Ranmaru Kurosaki – and a phone number. For a while she just lays in her room, number inputted into her phone and repeats his name aloud over and over, before she types the first message. Guess who, she says, and pockets her phone. It’s an hour later when it vibrates and she thinks someone must have warned him because the message guesses that she’s the girl from the party. She coyly inquires as to which girl she is, and his response makes her chew her bottom lip thoughtfully – “there was only one,” he says.

There is some sort of magic in texting, maybe, because he usually answers. Sometimes she prods a little too much and his replies will get terse, but sometimes he fills the character quote time and time again trying to explain the intricacies of rock and passion to the strawberry-blonde, and one night he’s four messages in when he suddenly calls her. She answers with pursed lips, and he continues right where he left off in the messages after she says hello, and ultimately explains that his fingers were aching from using the tiny keys. She listens with the reverence of a religious congregation, hums in the appropriate places. She could listen to him talk about anything, she realizes, if he speaks with that much conviction. 

Her conversations with him lack flirtation, now. Now she tells him about jazz and he argues about rock and the two of them buttheads until she giggles and admits that this is the first real conversation she has had in a long time, and she can tell he doesn’t know what she means by that. That’s perfectly okay, though.

It’s been three months since the party when she wrangles his address out of him with much reluctance on his party, and the insistence that she won’t like what she sees. She makes the family chauffeur drive halfway there and then she walks the rest of the way, and flounces into his sparsely-decorated apartment like its the Ritz and she has a reservation. Her phone rings, her brother’s number on the screen. She shuts it off.

She leaves with a mix tape he burned for her quickly before he walked her to her designated pickup place. He tells her its too dangerous for her to walk alone, now that it’s nighttime. She smiles. As he watches her climb into the long limousine from the shadows he thinks that’s the last time he’ll ever see her.

He’s wrong. He’s barely awake, breakfast still in the pan, when there is a knock on the door. It’s Ren, standing there, looking like something out of a magazine as usual, with breakfast in a bag and the CD he made for her on her iPod as well as a few more purchased albums because she hardly slept a wink, she was so excited. Her driver brought her all the way to the apartment, this time, and introduces himself to Ranmaru; his name is George, and he is Ren-sama’s chauffeur. He doesn’t have to say he’s her bodyguard, Ranmaru can tell by the heat he’s packing. But when he hears George on the way back to the car tell someone on the phone that he dropped Ren off at the mall she had been using as the half-way point, Ran decides the man’s okay.

She doesn’t tell him much about her. Not the real things, like the phone calls she ignores – he learns later when she’s in the bathroom and her screen lights up with a call that it’s from her older brother – and the limousine and locket she keeps under her shirt but fiddles with sometimes when she’s nervous. He knows she models, but not about the insecurities that come with the job. He knows she has boyfriends off and on, because sometimes they call, but she ignores them too and smiles secretly at him when she catches him looking at her. 

He invites her to one of his shows. She goes, and notes she stands out. Next time she’ll blend in better. For now she’s too preoccupied with Ranmaru’s electricity to worry about the stares, and when she greets him backstage she even ignores the guys that swoop in thinking she’s a an out-of-place girl looking for a good time, though Ranmaru doesn’t and glares at them until they back away from her. She congratulates him on a successful performance, and she tries not to stare too hard at one of the rare, small smiles she gets in return.

She spends the night the next time she’s at his apartment, and most of the night is spent sitting in his lap trying to wrap her head around the guitar and its strings and notes and chords as he guides her fingers along its neck and tries not to think much about the way she fills his lap and how warm her back is when he presses against it to lean over her and correct her form. But she is not so easily shaken from his mind at the next concert she attends she’s beaming at him so proudly and she looks so good dressed up in a style she proclaimed to be more rock that before he can catch himself he kisses her, square on the mouth. And the wide-eyed, lips parted look of surprise she grants him earns her another one, this kiss slower and when they stop he has ruby red lipstick all over his face and neck and has his arms around her waist.

It doesn’t feel like much has changed – haven’t we always kissed, Ren teases when Ran makes an off-handed comment about it – when their relationship takes on a new meaning. Sometimes when she stays the night she wakes up with considerably less clothes on than she arrived with, but sometimes that’s only because she borrowed his shower and washed off the day’s makeup and spent a few hours watching films with him in a pair of his sweatpants and an oversized tee-shirt with wet hair. She’s pretty like that too, he thinks, but he doesn’t really tell her that in words. 

It’s been a year since they met, she tells him one evening while she presses her skin against his. Is it, he asks absently, toying with her long fingers by the tips of her painted nails. She nods, and presses her face against his chest. It is, she reaffirms dreamily, then abruptly sits up, her sky-blue eyes honing in on the cold metal that settles at the base of one of her fingers. She gives him that look of surprise that reminds him of the night he first kissed her, her gaze flickering between the ring on her finger and his face. “I kinda want to wake up with you every morning,” he explains, going a little red in the face when he sees the shine of tears form at the rim of her eyes. She doesn’t trust herself to speak so she just nods, then sobs, latching on tightly to him and burying her face against him. 

There’s still some little details to work out, but they can fix everything at their own pace, Ranmaru assumes. For now the promise of a future is a nice thing to have.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again, reposted from old account to new account.


	3. Bonus Track -- Hijirikawa Masato

"Come see me~?" The request from pouty lips coupled with extended arms and grabby hands by itself was hard to ignore, but with the hints of sleep remaining in her voice she almost sounded on the verge of tears and Masato simply could not ignore the request. He slid back into bed, back into her arms that wrapped tightly around him and squeezed as she buried her face against his chest, cheek rubbing against the silk of his night robe. "What's wrong?" Eyes the color of the sky stared up at him, something about the gesture coy, but careful, controlled. 

He smoothed a large palm over her hair, stroking strands the color of the dawn sun with such reverence that she actually shivered and snuggled closer to his larger frame. "Just a dream, nothing more." Holding her in his arms had instantly put him at ease in a way nothing else could. The sleepy smile he got in return warmed his heart, chasing away any lingering anxiety. 

"Silly man, waking me up with your nightmares.." She teased, kissing right over his beating heart. She felt it flutter beneath her lips and she flushed with pride. Masato was such a quiet man, but he was passionate and so very full of love. It pleased her that even a little kiss could affect him, after two full years of marriage together.

"You best get back to sleeping, Jinguji Rena." His tone was just as soft, just as light as he returned her teases.

"To the world I might be Jinguji Rena, but haven't I made it clear~? With you, I'm Hijirikawa Rena."

"I know, love. I only wished to hear it again from you."

**Author's Note:**

> reposted to new account, sorry.


End file.
